The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets

About this book

"Lolita Lebrns granddaughter heir to the most public female embodiment of heroic self-sacrifice in Puerto Rico in this century has written a memoir full of searing intimate truths silences broken open to reveal the personal costs of public myth making. . . . A momentous act of courage. " -- The Womens Review of Books A shred of black lace. A broken hand mirror. A spidery strip of false eyelash. These are the fragments left to Irene Vilar granddaughter of Lolita Lebrn the revered martyr for Puerto Rican independence who in 1954 sprayed the U.S. House of Representatives with gunfire. In The Ladies Gallery Vilar revisits the legacy of her grandmother and that of her anguished mother who leapt from a speeding car when Vilar was eight. Eleven years after her mothers death Vilar awakens in a psychiatric hospital and begins to face the devastating inheritance of abandonment and suicide passed down to her from grandmother and mother. Alternating between Vilars notes from the psychiatric ward and the unraveling of her familys secrets this razor-sharp memoir of three generations of Puerto Rican women is urgent impassioned unforgettable. "An autobiography as fantastic as any novel. " --Boston Globe "Profoundly moving and beautifully written." --Rosario Ferre author of The House on the Lagoon